Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Reaching Across The Aisle

by digby

… with your feet planted firmly on your own side.

I am not going to criticize Nancy Pelosi for talking about bipartisanship and reaching across the aisle because, you know, that’s politics. It would be churlishly Republican not to say such things in victory.

But actions speak louder than words and I stand by my earlier admonition to the new Democratic majority:

The chattering classes are all abuzz with the notion that now is the time to bind up the nation’s wounds and work across the aisle. (I can’t help but wonder why they didn’t see the need for such rapproachment during the last decade of slash and burn GOP partisanship.) This pattern is well documented. The Republicans will continue to drain the treasury and play out their “movement” experiments and then have the Democrats step up and clean up the messes they make until this is stopped.

We are confronting some very serious problems right now, only one of which is terrorism. The Republicans have destroyed our international reputation at the very time when we need global cooperation. And they have driven the nation itself into the ditch dividing the country and blaming everyone but themselves for their failures.

The Democrats have to be the “grown-ups” yes. And one of the unpleasant tasks will be figuring out what went wrong, putting safeguards in place so the same things don’t happen again and making people take responsibility for their actions. That is what adults do. Letting bygones be bygones and simply blathering on about how we all need to put the unpleasantness behind us and get along will not win the respect of the American people nor will it fix the problems this nation faces. (That, after all, is the indulgent mommy model that the Republicans have been using as a club with which to beat us over the head for the last 30 years. No more.)

Now, politicians can make speeches about bipartisanship and sing kumbaaya all they want. I’m sure it is a very soothing tune and one that is necessary. But the Democratic party had best not forget that the actions a Democratic majority takes in the next two years will determine if the American people can trust them to defend the nation and fix the mess going forward. It’s very hard to see how that will happen if they capitulate to John Cornyn’s whimpering about how mean and nasty they are.

The polls show that the American people are behind them and the world is behind them. For the good of the party, the good of the country and the good of the planet, they just have to tough out the criticism they will receive from the mincing GOP courtiers in the press and the blubbering, wailing Republicans, and Do. The. Right. Thing.

None of that means that there isn’t ample room for legislation on which we can all agree. The door should always be open to those who want to negotiate and compromise. But unless the last decade of Republican mendacity, malfeasance and corruption is exposed, the lesson republicans will take from this is that they can promise everything, do anything and the only repurcussions will a couple of years out of power when they can blame the Democrats for their failures. To not require some sort of accountability for this is a very serious moral hazard.

I could be wrong, but the first female Speaker of the House doesn’t sound like an indulgent mommy who is inclined to so such things:

STAHL: (Voiceover) Christine, the second oldest of four daughters and one son, says her mother was the disciplinarian and drill sergeant in the family then, as she is in Congress now.

Ms. PELOSI: So we were always expected to make sure that our homework was done and that we were prepared for what we did. She would always say, “Proper preparation prevents poor performance.”

[…]

STAHL: (Voiceover) …and a grandmother of five.

When I asked your daughter Christine how you “rule,” she said you were motherly.

Rep. PELOSI: I guess it depends on your definition of motherly. If motherly means we’re going to have order in the house, yes.

STAHL: That’s motherly.

STAHL: (Voiceover) Well, she’s certainly brought order to the Democrats. She has insisted on no more bickering in public and just saying no to nearly everything that comes out of the Bush White House. In other words, party discipline, kind of like the Republicans do it. As a result, Democrats now vote together more often than they have since Eisenhower was president. How has someone so clearly not one of the boys managed to keep them in line? Well, one way is money.

[…]

STAHL: (Voiceover) She has personally raised more than $100 million, second only to Bill and Hillary Clinton, which she dispenses generously to her colleagues. Another way she rules is through good, old-fashioned hardball.

People say Nancy Pelosi is tough as nails.

Rep. PELOSI: I’m very strong. I don’t know tough, but…

STAHL: Every time I ask you about it, you retreat into, `Oh, no, I’m a mother, I’m a grandmother.’

Rep. PELOSI: No.

STAHL: You are tough. You have to–I mean, it goes without saying.

Rep. PELOSI: I’m tough.

STAHL: You got there. You did it.

Yes she did.

I’m a little bit surprised that there hasn’t been more hoopla about Pelosi breaking the big glass ceiling. (Maybe it will happen when she actually takes her place.) She’s going to be third in line to the presidency, the most powerful elected woman in American history. It’s a big deal — another barrier down.

I don’t think this person is going to be hampered in the exercize of leadership by the lack of a proper Republican male organ. She has metaphorical “balls” (or ovaries) the size of cantaloupes. I wouldn’t underestimate her.

They are going to continue to demonize her as some sort of deranged succubus, but they’d better be careful. Lot’s of women are watching and they aren’t going to like her character being assassinated with thinly veiled attacks on female inadequacy or gay insinuations or any of the other usual rightwing tricks. Criticism is fine but this woman has achieved something substantial and I doubt women are going to be happy to see her demeaned by some lowlife fratboy punk with nasty, cheap shots.

Don’t play the sexism card, fellas (and Ann Coulter.) At least half of the electorate sees these tired put-downs as an unpleasant reminder of the ex-boyfriend, boss or husband they’d still like to slap upside the head and there are plenty of men who cringe with embarrassment when they hear them. Remember, “proper preparation prevents poor performance.”

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[sic]Tandrums

by digby

You knew Atlas had to be on the verge of a meltdown, didn’t you? Today didn’t help. Her lovah-man is being sent up to the hill again and it may be that he won’t actually be confirmed.

Via Alex at Martini Republic:

Is this to be the latest blood sacrifice coming out of a bowed Bush White House? And I say here, now, STOP THE INSANITY. Throwing our best, our brightest to the insatiable leftist beast makes them hungrier. Rumsfeld, now Bolton? WTF? and Why?

Someone call that asshat Charlie Chafee McCarthy – who btw – got what was coming to him, and tell that dickless wonder to let the Bolton nomination out of committee.

~~~

Rumsfeld was a mistake ……….. yes folks, my thoughts on that are here — the left wanted a clean, tidy war with the jihadis and blamed Rumsfeld for their lack of decorum? Or not. More likely, it was just the constant, inane drone of the 6 year Democrat temper tandrum [sic] – if it wasn’t Rumsfeld, then Cheney ……..

But Bolton? Why Bolton? Talk about taming the lions. He accomplished everything, he accomplished the impossible

You can see why the UN Ambassador gives her a long interview in the middle of and international crisis, seeks her wise counsel and values her hard work as his internet confirmation advocate. The two of them share a similarly restrained temperament — just the thing for the nation’s top diplomat.

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Velvet Mafia

by digby

This is odd. Americablog posted the Youtube of Bill Maher saying Ken Mehlman is gay on Larry King last night and CNN has demanded that it be pulled and they’ve altered their transcript. Hmm.

Now, WorldNet Daily, rather breathlessly promoting the new religious rightwing meme that teh gays have invaded the GOP body politic, writes this:

Some in Washington have charged the White House and Congress are run by a “Gay Republican Mafia.”

Deputy White House chief of staff Karl Rove’s adopted father, who died in 2004, was a closet “gay” who left his mother when Rove was a senior in high school. But Rove still supports a ban on “gay” marriage. “The ideal is that marriage ought to be and should be a union of a man and a woman,” he has said.

He and his wife, Darby, have one child.

Hey, Ted Haggard has five…

Why would they mention Karl in this context unless somebody has said he’s part of this secret gay cabal? (Not that it surprises me. My rule of thumb from now on is that all these conservatives are closet cases until proven otherwise.) Still, I have to wonder. Is this going to be their way of throwing the losers under the bus?

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Dear Jim Wallis

by tristero

Dear Jim,

Recently, you wrote:

In this election, both the Religious Right and the secular Left were defeated, and the voice of the moral center was heard.

With all due respect, sir, “secular left?” “Moral center?” That’s the way Ted Haggard used to talk. You know that’s the vacuous language of christianism. They’re hypocrites. And losers.

So knock it off, Jim. I really thought you were better than that.

Love,

tristero

It Ain’t Over

by digby

Most of you probably already know this, but there are ten House races still outstanding with razor thin margins. Here’s the run-down from TPM

A bunch of good Dem candidates in very tough districts did amazingly well. It would be great to see a few of them pull it out.

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Welcome Back Reagan Democrats

by digby

Good for Jim Webb. He denied the idea that he’d become a Democrat purely on the basis of Iraq. He explained that he’d originally become a Republican on national security issues but that like a lot of people who’d done the same thing, he’d always been concerned with matters of economic fairness and social justice. He feels very comfortable in the new progressive Democratic majority.

People of sense are beginning to see that liberal-hating, low taxes, guns and Jesus aren’t enough to sustain the country they want to live in — and that for all the Republican chest thumping about national security they are no more capable or serious than a bunch of kids playing RISK.

And it isn’t just national security, is it?

After 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan, the budget deficit was growing. So at a meeting with the vice president after the mid-term elections in 2002, Suskind writes that O’Neill argued against a second round of tax cuts.

“Cheney, at this moment, shows his hand,” says Suskind. “He says, ‘You know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter. We won the mid-term elections, this is our due.'”

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Southern Comfort

by digby

Many of you probably read Tom Schaller’s postings throughout the blogosphere on TAPPED, The Gadflyer and Daily Kos. He has also written a book called “Whistling Past Dixie” where he makes the case for a non southern strategy. It’s a very interesting thesis that makes a basic point, which nobody wants to admit, but which is undoubtedly true: the conservative majority in the south is much more conservative than the rest of the country and the Democrats simply cannot win by trying to accomodate it. And by conservative, I’m not talking about what we used to think of as conservative, I’m talking about the special regional conservatism that’s dominated the GOP since it gelled as a southern dominated party in the early 90’s.

This election marks the end of the GOP behemoth for any number of reasons, corruption and incoherence not the least of them. But I think there is also a new awareness that southern conservatism, which leans heavily on cultural indicators and the religious right is not working for most people. The vast majority of gains for the Democrats in this election came from outside the south.

As I wrote yesterday, the Democrats elected everything from socialists in the Northeast to crew-cutted farmers in the west (and even pulled out a win in Virginia with a military hero, a swing state mostly due to its northern, suburban immigrants!) The Democratic party is more culturally diverse and less strictly defined by a particular tribal identifier these days, no matter how much they beat the dead hippie. This is a big country and the Democratic tent much more accurately reflects the mainstream of America than the Republicans do.

I’ll be writing more about Schaller’s book in the coming weeks because I think it’s something we need to think about. It does not, as people seem to think, write off the south. But he recognizes that Democrats kow-towing to a conservative southern minority has perverted our politics and sold short our own vision of individual liberty and the common good.

Meanwhile, on this day when we find that the Democrats are back in the majority in both houses since the 1994 Republican takeover, here’s a little trip down memory lane for you all. Back in 1998, Weekly Standard editor Christopher Caldwell wrote an article on this subject in The Atlantic that caused an amazing amount of consternation among the DC cognoscenti. It was politically incorrect in the extreme by today’s conservative PC standards. And it was wrong in some important respects. But it was prescient in one in particular and I think it would have been proven so much earlier had it not been for the voting shenanigans in 2000 and then 9/11. The fundamentals of his argument have been correct ever since he wrote them:

The Republican Party is increasingly a party of the South and the mountains. The southernness of its congressional leaders Speaker Newt Gingrich, of Georgia; House Majority Leader Dick Armey and House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, of Texas; Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, of Mississippi; Senate Majority Whip Don Nickles, of Oklahoma only heightens the identification. There is a big problem with having a southern, as opposed to a midwestern or a California, base. Southern interests diverge from those of the rest of the country, and the southern presence in the Republican Party has passed a tipping point, at which it began to alienate voters from other regions.

As southern control over the Republican agenda grows, the party alienates even conservative voters in other regions. The prevalence of right-to-work laws in southern states may be depriving Republicans of the socially conservative midwestern trade unionists whom they managed to split in the Reagan years, and sending Reagan Democrats back to their ancestral party in the process. Anti-government sentiment makes little sense in New England, where government, as even those who hate it will concede, is neither remote nor unresponsive.

The most profound clash between the South and everyone else, of course, is a cultural one. It arises from the southern tradition of putting values particularly Christian values at the center of politics. This is not the same as saying that the Republican Party is too far right; Americans consistently tell pollsters that they are conservative on values issues. It is, rather, that the Republicans have narrowly defined values as the folkways of one regional subculture, and have urged their imposition on the rest of the country. Again, the nonsoutherners who object to this style of politics may be just as conservative as those who practice it. But they are put off to see that traditional values are now defined by the majority party as the values of the U-Haul-renting denizens of two-year-old churches and three-year-old shopping malls.

Southerners now wag the Republican dog. How did the party let that happen? (The Atlantic Monthly June, 1998)

They let it happen because the politicians believed their own hype and the think tank Straussians hold the voters in such low estemm they figured they could impose extremely conservative regional values on the entire country when they can’t even impose them on the minority of decent, hardworking progressives who fight them everyday in their own southern backyard. And then they figured they could keep the rubes dazzled with goose stepping and flag waving while they raided the treasury on their own behalf and experimented on the global stage with stoned-freshman, bullsession experiments. What hubris. This election is the first indication that the nation is righting itself to its natural state since the crazy events of 1998-9/11. And it’s natural state is not to be dominated by a conservative southern minority.

Now to my way of thinking, the 50 state strategy remains important in this argument to the extent that we commit to developing active state parties in the south and give support to people who are willing to get out there and make the progressive argument in hostile territory. You can’t ever convince anyone to change unless you talk to them. And there is something in the idea that forcing the Republicans to pay attention to their home country makes them spend money they’d rather spend elsewhere. But really, the idea is to win and it’s reached a point at which it’s a zero sum game. If we continue to sell our souls because we think that people who vote for Trent Lott and Jeff Sessions will finally see the light we are crazy. The south is solid conservative Republican and until there is an historically unprecedented sea change in southern politics it’s going to remain that way.

Yet, for the last 20 years Democratic strategists have been convinced that they needed to move their agenda ever closer to conservative southern thinking in order to win nationally and that formulation is wrong. Respect and engagement yes. Capitulation no. It hasn’t worked and it isn’t good for the country to enable the most regressive forces in the nation. Conservative southerners haven’t just been wagging the Republican Party’s dog, it’s been wagging the whole country’s dog and its time is over.

I’ll look forward to discussing Schaller’s belief that the Democrats do not need to win in the south in order to win the country, in future posts. He writes:

Democrats should forget about recapturing the South in the near term and begin building a national majority that ends, not begins, with restoring their lost southern glory. Most of the South is already beyond the Democrats’ reach, and much of the rest continues to move steadily into the Republican column. White southerners used to be among the most economically liberal voters in America but are now among the most conservative. The South is America’s most militaristic and least unionized region, and the powerful combination of race and religion create a socially conservative, electorally hostile environment for most statewide Democratic candidates and almost all Democratic presidential nominees.

Meanwhile, there are growing opportunities for Democrats to improve their electoral fortunes in other parts of the country, where demographic changes and political attitudes are more favorable to Democratic messages and messengers. Citizens in the Midwest have been decimated by globalization and are looking for economic salvation. In the Southwest where white and, most especially, Hispanic populations are booming, a strong platform on immigration reform and enforcement could divide the Republicans and put the region up for grabs. In parts of the Mountain West, Democrats can pair the lessons learned from Ross Perot’s fiscal reform campaigns with an emphasis on land and water conservation to establish traction among disaffected libertarians and the millions of coastal transplants who either moved westward or bounced back eastward from California in search of open spaces and more affordable suburban lifestyles. If the Democrats can simultaneously expand and solidify their existing margins of control in the Northeast and Pacific Coast states — specifically by targeting moderate Republicans for defeat, just as moderate Democrats in the South have been systematically terminated by the GOP — the Democrats can build a national majority with no help from the South in presidential elections and little help from southern votes elsewhere down the ballot.

That’s a pretty big checklist, no doubt. But these tasks are far more doable than trying to rewind history to re-create a pre-civil rights era Democratic South in post-civil rights America.

The South has long been America’s regional political outlier. When the Republicans dominated national politics for seven decades between the Civil War and the New Deal, they did so with almost no support from the South. Thanks to the significant African-American population base in the South, the Democrats will never be so handicapped from the outset because there will always be a minimum degree of Democratic support and number of Democratic elected officials in the region. Building a non-southern majority, therefore, should be much easier for Democrats today than it was for the Republicans a century ago. Anyone who claims otherwise is willfully ignoring partisan history, not to mention contemporary demography.

As Democrats expand their non-southern support, the South will continue to assimilate into the national political culture from which it had mostly divorced itself until recent decades. Then and only then can Democrats begin to rebrand themselves in Dixie. In the interim, the Democrats’ near-term goal should be to isolate the Republicans as a regional party that owns most of the South, but little else.

Schaller also suggests that it is still a winning formula to have two southerners on a national ticket, just not for the purpose of winning the deep south in a presidential election. After all, the rest of the country likes southerners just fine; it’s southern conservatism we don’t care for. You can’t be all things to all people and the Democratic coalition that increasingly encompasses the rest of the nation cannot continue to try to accomodate rightwing southern conservatism in its national message. The country has spoken and they don’t like what the southern Republican Party has been selling so they sure as hell aren’t going to buy the same thing from a bunch of Democrats running around in hunting caps and speaking in tongues.

I keep hearing that this isn’t an endorsement of Democrats, it’s a repudiation of Republicans. Ok fine. I hope the Democratic strategists are listening. If the country has repudiated the Republicans maybe that’s a signal that we should stop trying to be like them.

Update: Sidney Blumenthal makes the same point in this piece in The Guardian.

After the mid-term elections, the GOP has become a regional party of the South. And, in the future, Republicans can only hold their base by asserting their conservatism, which alienates the rest of the country. More than ever, the Republicans are dependent upon white evangelical voters in the South and sparsely populated Rocky Mountain states. The Republican coalition, its much-touted “big tent,” has nearly collapsed.

[…]

The Democratic Party that has advanced from the 2006 elections reasserts the Solid North, with inroads in the metropolitan states of the West, and, like the GOP of the past, challenges in the states of the peripheral South such as Arkansas, Tennessee and Virginia. This Democratic Party has never existed before. It is a center-left party with wings that can flap together. The party’s opposition to the Republicans on economic equity and social tolerance are its defining characteristics.

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Meet The New Guy

by digby

…same as the old guy.

It’s great that Rummy’s gone and all, but if anyone really thinks Robert Gates is going to bring fresh thinking to the Iraq or is the type of old hand who will speak truth to the codpiece, they are sadly mistaken. Gates is one of original bad guys:

Gates was investigated during the late 1980s and 1990s by independent counsel Lawrence Walsh over whether Gates had told the truth about the Iran-contra affair, which occurred during his tenure as deputy to Ronald Reagan’s CIA director, William Casey. Questions about Gates’s knowledge of secret arms sales to Iran—and the diversion of proceeds to support the Nicaraguan contras—caused Gates to withdraw his nomination to succeed Casey as CIA director in 1987.

Gates was again nominated by President George H.W. Bush to be CIA chief in 1991, setting off an intense and spirited confirmation hearing in which charges and countercharges about Iran-contra flared anew. Gates also was publicly accused by former CIA subordinates of slanting intelligence about the Soviet threat—a criticism that evokes an eerie parallel to accusations hurled against the current Bush administration over its handling of pre-war intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and alleged ties to Al Qaeda.

After months of partisan wrangling and debate, Gates was confirmed as CIA director in November 1991 and served in that capacity until the end of the first President Bush’s term in January 1993. He later served as director of the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and, after that, as president of Texas A&M University where the Bush library is housed. After Congress in 2004 passed “intelligence reform” legislation creating the post of a national intelligence director to co-ordinate the activities of feuding intelligence agencies, the White House approached Gates to see if he wanted to become the first new intelligence czar. But on that occasion, Gates turned George W. Bush down.

Bush today praised Gates as a “steady, solid leader who can help make the necessary adjustments in our approach to the current challenges.” And indeed some former associates describe Gates as a savvy and seasoned bureaucratic veteran who is almost certain to establish a more co-operative relationship with the uniformed services and other agencies.
But some of Gates’s old critics—who not coincidentally have also been critics of the current Bush administration’s Iraq policy—maintain he is not necessarily the best candidate for the job of correcting a war policy that is seriously off course.

When he heard today about Gates’s nomination, “I nearly choked on my sandwich,” said Mel Goodman, a former Soviet analyst at the CIA who testified against Gates’s nomination to be CIA director in 1991. “This is not a guy who’s ever been accused of speaking truth to power. If you’re looking for somebody who’s going to change Iraq policy, he’s hardly the guy to do it. The only policy he’s going to consider is what is acceptable to the White House.”

During his 1991 testimony, Goodman testified that Gates, as deputy CIA director, consistently politicized intelligence-community reports about Iran, Nicaragua and Afghanistan in order to cater to the hard-line anti-Soviet policies of the Reagan White House. Gates’s role as deputy CIA director “was to corrupt the process and the ethics of intelligence on all of these issues.” When Goodman protested his actions, Gates “went off like a Roman candle,” Goodman said today. “It was the same kind of manufacturing of intelligence” in the run-up to the Iraq war, Goodman said.

Congressional records and transcripts extensively document the debate over Gates’s credentials and record in the Bush and Reagan administrations. In one case, Democrats accused Gates of helping to push an allegedly contentious report about the Soviet Union’s influence in Iran.

One of the most controversial intelligence issues concerning Gates, as CIA No. 2, involved an investigation into contentious allegations that the Soviet Union played a role in the 1981 shooting, by a Turkish extremist, of Pope John Paul II. According to Senate transcripts, the CIA prepared a memo outlining the case for Soviet complicity in the attack on the pope and in a cover letter forwarding the document to Reagan. Gates allegedly stated that the intelligence review upon which the memo was based was comprehensive. However, a CIA internal review later denounced the memo as being skewed, and Gates himself later admitted the document had been based on thin evidence.

Sound familiar? Bush Junior’s administration didn’t invent this stuff. They just took it further than anybody else.

The reason Gates took the job is simply loyalty to the Bush family in their time of need. I doubt they could get anyone else to do it. He’s a seat warmer until Bush can fly out of town in the dead of night in January 2009 and leave this mess in the hands of his successor. Expect no changes.

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We Are All Conservatives Now

by digby

So I keep hearing that the conservatives really won yesterday, and yet:

From the country’s heartland, voters sent messages that altered America’s culture wars and dismayed the religious right — defending abortion rights in South Dakota, endorsing stem cell research in Missouri, and, in a national first, rejecting a same-sex marriage ban in Arizona.

Conservative leaders were jolted by the setbacks and looked for an explanation Wednesday. Gay-rights and abortion-rights activists celebrated.

The verdict on abortion rights was particularly clear. Oregon and California voters defeated measures that would have required parents to be notified before a girl under 18 could get an abortion, and South Dakotans — by a margin of 56 percent to 44 percent — rejected a new state law that would have banned all abortions except to save a pregnant woman’s life.

“This was really a rebellion in the heart of red-state, pro-life America — the heart of the northern Bible Belt,” said Sarah Stoesz, head of the
Planned Parenthood chapter that oversees South Dakota. “It sends a very strong message to the rest of the country.”

Naturally they are blaming Bush, their erstwhile noble Bible believing prince turned embarrassing loser:

Anti-abortion leaders said the GOP shared some of the blame for the defeat. The Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer, president of Human Life International, said
President Bush and other top Republicans failed to campaign strongly for the South Dakota abortion ban and against the Missouri stem cell measure.

“While South Dakotans fought valiantly to defend their babies, we once again witnessed an almost total lack of support from the national leadership,” Euteneuer said.

The anti-abortion group Operation Rescue said the election results meant any legislation from Congress restricting abortion would be “virtually impossible” for the next two years.

“America has voted and the bloody results have placed the most vulnerable among us, the pre-born, in the crosshairs for continued extermination,” said Operation Rescue President Troy Newman.

Gee, I wonder why mainstream American finally said they’ve had enough?

.. gay-rights supporters took heart at the relatively close results in some of the seven states, notably in South Dakota, where the ban received only 52 percent of the vote.

In Arizona, the defeat of the ban stemmed in part from its scope. It not only would have reinforced an existing state law against same-sex marriage, but also would have barred any government entities from recognizing civil unions or domestic partnerships in providing benefits to employees.

“We knew all along that once voters were informed about the true impact. … they would oppose this hurtful initiative,” said Steve May of Arizona Together, which opposed the measure. Gay-rights leaders said the election results would likely shelve any serious push for a federal ban-gay-marriage amendment. They also were pleased by the defeats of several Republicans whom they considered archenemies — notably Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and Indiana Rep. John Hostettler.

“It’s the end of an era for divisive, gay-bashing politics — at least in the minds of the American people,” said Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign.

Similarly, abortion-rights groups welcomed the defeat of Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline, a Republican who had touted his efforts to seize women’s medical records from abortion clinics.

If this is conservatism, then sign me up.

C’mon people. Their schtick is tired. The country is moving in a new direction and it isn’t conservative.

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Mainstream Progressives

by digby

12 years ago today I remember driving through a wierd other worldly landscape and listening to Rush on the radio the morning after Newt’s big victory. As remains true for most of rural America, his was the only radio station that I could get out there in the middle of nowhere. It was a festival of chest beating and nationalism that brought to mind some unpleasant associations with certain historical figures from the 1930’s. Their arrogance and disdain was on display even as they celebrated their big win — all they could talk about was that the country had rejected the soft and squishy hated liberals.

When I arrived back in LA I was astonished to find that the major media had adopted pretty much the same talking points I’d heard on Rush. Newt Gingrich was not discussed as the dangerous, demagogic fascist he was. Instead, he was being touted as America’s rightful leader. For the first time I fully realized that the press had been co-opted and the American people were not going to be informed that we were entering a new era of sophisticated, ruthless,take-no-prisoners radical Republican politics. Indeed, the press seemed to be reveling in it. It was a very bad day.

Imagine my surprise this morning, twelve years later, as Democrats come back into the majority in the House with a huge, decisive victory and the Senate is poised to tip as well and the press seems to be interpreting this election as a …. repudiation of the soft and squishy hated liberals. (Again, they are taking their cues from Rush Limbaugh who is also spinning the election as a loss for liberals.) The narrative is suspended in amber.

It’s wrong, of course, just as the earlier one was. This election proves that the Democrats are the mainstream political party. We just elected a socialist from Vermont and a former Reagan official from Virginia to the US Senate. We elected a number of Red State conservatives, true, but we are also going to have a Speaker of the House from San Francisco. We cover a broad swathe, ranging from sea to shining sea with only the most conservative old south remaining firmly in the hands of the Republican party. The idea that this is some sort of affirmation of conservatism is laughable. It’s an affirmation of mainstream American values and a rejection of the Republican radicalism this country has been in the grips of for the last 12 years.

And I’m sorry to have to inform all the kewl kidz and insiders, but this is largely due to the re-emergence of an active, vital, progressive base. Despite the fact that we aren’t goosestepping around shouting about our Victory For The Homeland the way the Gingrich Jugend did in 1994, a revolution — not of ideology, but necessity — is underway:

Here’s Rick Perlstein writing in TNR today:

The Democrats have won back the House. Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), nearly tripped over himself on the way to the microphone to claim the credit. In fact, while the tidal wave in the House looks like a bit of strategic genius by Emanuel–and pundits are starting to call it that way (Howard Fineman on MSNBC noted that the Democrats even picked up a seat in Kentucky, where the 3rd District candidate was John Yarmuth–“Emanuel’s fourth choice!” Fineman exclaimed, as if in awe of the power possessed by Emanuel’s mere table scraps)–in race after race, it actually represents the apotheosis of forces Emanuel has doubted all long: the netroots.

In two competitive House races in the Bluegrass State, Emanuel’s first choices lost by eleven and nine points. In the 2nd District it was Colonel Mike Weaver, the cofounder of Commonwealth Democrats, a group of conservative Democratic state legislators. In the 4th, it was Ken Lucas, a former congressman whom Robert Novak recently called “moderate conservative” in a column on Emanuel’s “recruiting coup” in coaxing Lucas out of retirement. Both were the kind of candidates Emanuel has favored in his famous nationwide recruiting drive. Yarmuth, meanwhile, was founder of the state’s first alternative newspaper, said things on the campaign trail things like “the No Child Left Behind Act … is a plan deliberately constructed to create ‘failing’ schools,” and called for “a universal health care system in which every citizen has health insurance independent of his or her employment.”

It was a pattern repeated across the country. New Hampshire’s 1st District delivered Carol Shea-Porter, a former social worker who got kicked out of a 2005 Presidential appearance for wearing a T-shirt that said turn your back on bush. That might have been her fifteen minutes of fame–if, last night, she hadn’t defeated two-term Republican incumbent Jeb Bradley. For the chance to face him, however, she had to win a primary against the DCCC’s preferred candidate, Jim Craig–whom Rahm Emanuel liked so much he made the unusual move of contributing $5000 to his primary campaign. Shea-Porter dominated Craig by 20 points–and then was shut out by the DCCC for general election funds.

Not all Emanuel’s losing recruits were beaten in primaries. Some were beaten in the general election. Christine Jennings, a banker and former Republican gunning for Katherine Harris’s former House seat lost in a squeaker to conservative Republican Vern Buchanan. Dan Seals, a black moderate in the Barack Obama mold who criticized the Democratic Party even in speeches to Democratic crowds, lost to the Republican incumbent in Emanuel’s backyard, Illinois’s 10th District–as did the DCCC’s most talked-about recruit, Tammy Duckworth of Illinois’s 6th. Emanuel poured as astonishing $3 million into her campaign. It bought her a three-point defeat. Activists say the money would have been better spent on all the promising candidates to whom Rahm wouldn’t give the time of day.

Many of them won anyway. John Hall is poised to become the Democrats’ version of Sonny Bono–a former environmental and anti-nuclear activist and co-author of the hit 1970s hit “Still the One,” he just won New York’s 19th District House seat. Chris Carney, now heading to Washington to represent Pennsylvania’s 10th, beat beleaguered incumbent (and alleged-strangler) Don Sherwood. “Until Carney was ahead by double digits,” complained Howie Klein of DownWithTyranny, a blog that backed his candidacy, “Rahm wouldn’t take his phone calls.” Larry Kissell, a high school social studies teacher, is, as of this writing, in a statistical dead heat with an incumbent Republican from of all places, North Carolina. Says Klein: “If Rahm had a little bit of foresight to see this guy was for real, and to see that he was a candidate who could have won, a little bit of money would have made all the difference for him.”

Still, Kissell didn’t go into battle unarmed. The thing all these successful candidates share in common is backing by the same dirty-necked bloggers and netroots activists that pundits have been calling the political kiss of death. Yarmuth, Shea-Porter, Hall, and Kissel–in addition to Democratic pickups Jerry McNerney in California, Joe Sestak and (perhaps) Lois Murphy in Pennsylvania, Bruce Braley in Iowa, Kirstin Gillibrand in New York, and Senators-elect Jon Tester of Montana, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, and Sherrod Brown of Ohio–were all beneficiaries of a PAC called Blue America, a joint project of the blogs Firedoglake, DownWithTyranny, and Crooks & Liars. “Most of the candidates we support come directly from our readers,” Klein says.

Some of their chosen beneficiaries were hopeless and remained so. The bloggers say that’s the risk you take when you’re trying to build a party infrastructure for the long term. Others were hopeless, however, only until the netroots-types got their mitts on them. When Klein decided that all Larry Kissell needed was a boost, he remembered how radio guys used to use long gas lines as promotional opportunities. Together, they arrived at an idea: Kissell would subsidize the sale gas at a filling station in his North Carolina district at the price it sold for when the incumbent had entered office–$1.22 a gallon. A line of cars soon stretched down the thoroughfare. The unknown Democrat was suddenly all over TV, shaking hands and pitching a hard Democratic message. He started inching up in the polls.

By the end of October, he was doing so well that Emanuel, finally smelling the pickup opportunity, added Kissell to DCCC’s “Red to Blue” fund-raising program. Emanuel had been too preoccupied to notice Kissell, Howie Klein complains: He already had a darling North Carolina candidate: Heath Shuler (who also won his election last night). But Shuler “won’t even commit to voting for Pelosi,” Klein groused. He “probably tossed a coin to decide if he was going to run as a Republican in Tennessee or a Democratic in North Carolina.”

The bloggers, blunt as they may be, think they have a better plan for building a lasting Democratic majority. Last night’s results suggest the rest of us should start taking it seriously.

(It isn’t just the cult of Rahm. I heard Chris Matthews try to make the case last night that Chuck Shumer went out and found a guy who used to be in the Reagan administration and another guy with a crew cut to run against the Republicans. Surprisingly, both Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert corrected him and pointed out that Webb and Tester were both opposed by Shumer in their primaries and won in spite of him. Matthews was surprised. He couldn’t fathom that these two he-men hadn’t been chosen by the conservative establishment but rather had emerged through the grassroots.)

In an pollster post-mortem today, Chuck Todd said the Democratic Party has become a big tent party by accident. That is not the case. The fact is that over the last few years a rather imagination-limited, but well-funded, establishment waited for a chance to exploit Republican weakness as 9/11 began to fade, while a practical, visionary activist wing emerged to build a new political landscape. This is anything but an accident. It’s been in the works since at least 1998 as the netroots kept the truth about Republicans alive while the media were writhing together in orgiastic Clinton/Gore loathing and Bush sycophancy. There would have been no big victory last night without it.

And regardless of our pragmatism, make no mistake: real fighting progressives are once again active players in this game, coming in with money and energy and ideas. As Perlstein’s piece shows, this new group of energized progressives are not children, 60’s hippies or fools. We are not asking for a seat at the table. We’re not begging for a voice. Neither are we crazed ideological revolutionaries in the Gingrichian mold. We’re simply progressive American citizens who are taking our seat and demanding our say after 12 long years of being shunted aside as if we have no place in this party or this country.

They can have their bizarroworld interpretations of events and they can crown a new crop of “boy geniuses” who played nicely by GOP rules. It doesn’t matter. The Republican Revolution is dead. And the mainstream, progressive Democratic majority is silent no more.

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